When people set the highest value on relationships to one another, it does not take them long to find material accommodations for these. One is dealing here, as at every other point, with our estimate of the good life.
In Megalopolis the sentiment of friendship wastes away. Friends become, in the vulgarism of modern speech, “pals,” who may be defined as persons whom your work compels you to associate with or, on a still more debased level, persons who will allow you to use them to your advantage. The meeting of minds, the sympathy between personalities which all cultured communities have regarded as part of the good life, demand too much sentiment for a world of machines and a false egalitarianism, and one detects even a faint suspicion that friendship, because it rests upon selection, is undemocratic. It is this type of mentality which will study with perfect naïveté a work on how to win friends and influence people. To one brought up in a society spiritually fused—what I shall call the metaphysical community—the idea of a campaign to win friends must be incomprehensible. Friends are attracted by one’s personality, if it is of the right sort, and any conscious attempt is inseparable from guile. And the art of manipulating personalities obviously presumes a disrespect for personality. Only in a splintered community, where the spirit is starved to the point of atrophy, could such an imposture flourish.
Richard Weaver
Ideas have consequences
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